Chinese MMORPG banning cross-gender roleplayers?

Reports that a Chinese MMORPG has frozen accounts of male users playing female …

On the Internet, news travels quickly, and when the Asian news site Pacific Epoch posted a small news story about a Chinese Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) called King of the World freezing the accounts of "male players who chose to play female in-game characters," the word spread like wildfire. Gaming sites all over the Internet ran with the story, and online outrage ran wild as gamers everywhere debated the validity of forcing virtual characters to have the same gender as their real-life players.

But was the story even true in the first place? Every site that reported on it either linked to other sites that had picked it up or referred to the original Pacific Epoch post. That post mentioned a company called Aurora Technology, which it claimed was a subsidiary of Chinese media firm Shandra Entertainment. So far, so good: Shandra did indeed purchase Aurora Technology in July of this year. According to Pacific Epoch, the game in question is called King of the World. Thanks to the magic of Google, attempting to search for this game brings up only stories that linked to the original Pacific Epoch post, a dizzying and frustrating exercise in online circular logic. However, Shandra Entertainment does have a web site, and on that site they helpfully list the MMORPG properties that the company currently owns and operates. The list is as follows: The Legend of Mir II, The World of Legend, The Sign, The Age, Magical Land, RO, D.O., and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Nowhere in the list does King of the World appear.

Could the game be a property of Aurora Technology that for some reason doesn't show up in Shandra's official lists? At the time of acquisition two months ago, Aurora operated only two MMORPGs: Feng Yun Online and Legend Online. However, a little more digging did uncover a post from Chinese gaming news web site 17173.com stating that King of the World Online did in fact enter an open beta on August 22. If the number 17173 sounds familiar, it should: the site (reverse the digits to get the joke) is listed in the original Pacific Epoch story as being the source for the news about King of the World account freezes. Oddly, however, neither 17173's English-language site nor a Google-translated version of their Chinese site mentions the gender restrictions issue anywhere. Could 17173 simply be playing an elaborate joke on the English-speaking Internet, or do they know something that nobody else seems to?

Going back to the Pacific Epoch news story, it maintained that players in King of the World would have to "prove their biological sex with a webcam." This seems rather unlikely given the ease of cheating such a system and the fact that it would require all players to have a web cam installed. The game's current beta status also makes the story somewhat questionable: who freezes out accounts during a beta test? Still, the idea is not beyond the realm of possibility: other Asian MMORPGs such as MapleSEA (Maple Story South East Asia) require players to select their gender when creating an account, and afterwards they can only create characters that are of the same gender.

Ars Technica attempted to contact Shandra Entertainment to either confirm or deny the story, but so far we have received no response.